Under Iron Hand of Russia’s Proxy, a Chechen Revival

Sunday

Three years after a wave of guerrilla and terrorist attacks in Russia’s war against Chechen separatists, the republic has fallen almost fully under the control of the Kremlin.

GROZNY, Russia — In the evenings, unexpected sights appear in this city, which less than two years ago seemed beyond saving and repair.

Women stroll on sidewalks that did not exist last year. Teenagers cluster under newly installed street lights, chatting on cellphones. At a street corner, young men gather to race cars on a freshly paved road — a scene, considering that this is the capital of Chechnya, that feels out of place and from another time.

Throughout the city, local officials, most of them former rebels who waged a nationalist Islamic insurgency against Russia, lounge in cafes, assault rifles idled beside them.

Three years after a wave of guerrilla and terrorist attacks caused many analysts to say that Russia’s war against Chechen separatists could not be won, the republic has fallen almost fully under the control of the Kremlin and its indigenous proxies, led by Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the Chechen president.

Mr. Kadyrov’s human rights record is chilling, and allegations of his government’s patterns of brutality and impunity are widespread. Yet even his most severe critics say he has developed significant popular support, in part because of the clear changes that have accompanied his firm and fearsome rule.

Fighting has been sporadic and small in scale for a second year. A large rebel offensive did not materialize this summer, as the separatists had predicted. Buoyed by a sustained lull in fighting and flush with cash, Mr. Kadyrov’s government has rebuilt most of its capital and outlying areas.

Like Stalingrad after World War II, Grozny, the Chechen capital, has reappeared from the rubble. It has done so more swiftly than European cities revived by the Marshall Plan.

As recently as early 2006, Grozny was less a city than rows of shattered buildings overlooking cesspools. It now has electricity almost around the clock and reliable natural gas service. Many neighborhoods have water. Block upon block of housing complexes have been rebuilt, and families have moved into buildings that a year ago were buckling shells.

Markets are crowded with products, from computers and furniture to air-conditioners, flat-screen televisions and new cars.

Improvements have also been made in outlying towns. Services are being extended into the Caucasus Mountains, the separatists’ former stronghold. Many residents speak of a degree of peace they had not seen in 13 years.

“I compare how we used to live, and it is like we are in a fairy tale now,” said Zulika Aliyeva, 46, whose home was destroyed when Russia sacked Grozny in 1999 and 2000 and who spent years squatting in a ruined building. The building she moved to recently has been partly repaired.

Alexei Malashenko, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center who studies Chechnya and recently visited the republic again, said the pace of change was astounding. “I couldn’t believe I was in Grozny,” he said.

Russia’s defeat of the heart of the rebellion in Chechnya appears to flow, in the simplest sense, from a two-stage formula: extraordinary violence, followed by extraordinary investment. One corollary has been that allegations of human rights abuses by both Russia and its local allies have been largely ignored.

At the center of this formula has been Mr. Kadyrov, the rebel turned Kremlin ally who was widely labeled an illiterate bandit when he entered public life three years ago after his father, then the president, was assassinated.

Mr. Kadyrov, like the republic he leads, has defied the dark projections. As Chechnya’s president since this spring, he has become a populist who has managed to embrace Sufi Islam, Chechen ethnic identity and Kremlin authority simultaneously.

His success has a paradoxical quality to it. Paramilitary units in his government are suspected of kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings. Combat has not fully stopped and sporadic fighting has spread to neighboring republics. Large graves are full of unidentified remains — the victims, human rights advocates say, of a campaign to kill people suspected of being insurgents and punish their families.

But several local people, each of whom had complaints about corruption in the reconstruction programs or inequities in the policies of distributing restored housing, praised him.

Mr. Kadyrov, they said, has driven his government to work and forced government-hired contractors to meet his harsh deadlines. “They are afraid of Ramzan,” said Linda Saraliyeva, 28, one of Ms. Aliyeva’s neighbors. “What he has done in only one year, no one else has managed to do.”

Chechen officials say that security conditions have improved so much that the republic, closed to outsiders, hopes to reduce its checkpoints and allow foreigners to visit as soon as next year.

The government, in a sign of confidence that detractors say is bizarre, has begun working on a tourism plan to lure outsiders to the mountains and hiking and horseback trails. One small hotel has opened. Construction of a five-star hotel, connected to a sports complex, is planned.

“We have found that many people would like to come to Chechnya,” said Igor Garayev, an adviser to the Chechen minister responsible for athletics and tourism. “In a year or two, we will see people coming here.”

Another sign of recovery and ebbing hostility is the competition for housing. Before the war, Grozny had about 79,000 apartments, said Rizvan Bakharchiyev, a deputy mayor. The city government expects to be able to restore about 45,000 apartments; the rest, he said, were in buildings that were destroyed.

Already multiple families are seeking the same apartments, claiming to have owned them before the war, or to have bought them since.

Ms. Aliyeva, for example, has been told to leave the apartment in which she and her family survived the war by a man who has said he is its owner. Other abandoned apartments, now slated for repair, have cellphone numbers painted on their walls beside the word “owner” or “master,” in a warning that the unit is claimed.

Mr. Bakharchiyev said the city’s population, decimated by violence, disease and flight, was rising swiftly. “I think we will soon have more people than before the war,” he said.

Support for Mr. Kadyrov is by no means complete. In one slum known locally as Shanghai, residents said they were being forced to move to worse housing — tiny wood-framed huts in a field polluted by oil — because their land was now valuable to Grozny’s new real estate speculators.

“What can I think of Ramzan?” said one young woman, who asked that her name be withheld to protect her. “They evict us with lies.”

A large fraction of the population is employed in reconstruction jobs, but Memorial, a private human rights organization, said many workers had not received their wages, or received less than promised. “The new city has been created by the hard labor of Chechen builders, and many of them have not been paid for it,” said Natalya Estemirova, a member of Memorial’s staff.

Abductions have declined but have not stopped altogether. The suspected kidnappers, many of them in the local police, face little threat of punishment, Ms. Estemirova said.

In Grozny, a few buildings have been rebuilt on the outside only, and remain ruins inside or only partly finished — the result of what some residents said was construction fraud. The means by which the vast and almost instantaneous program of reconstruction has been underwritten has also not been clear.

Mr. Bakharchiyev, the deputy mayor, said roughly half of the reconstruction was paid for by the Akhmad Kadyrov Fund, named for Mr. Kadyrov’s father. The fund is not open to outside scrutiny; its holdings and financial sources are not publicly known.

Several Grozny residents, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety, said one financing source was extortion of contractors and government workers, who are required to donate. There is also, officials said, graft on a monumental scale.

Part of Chechnya’s territory is above an oil field. One government official said Mr. Kadyrov and his government diverted large quantities of oil and sold it on black markets. Some of the profit, the official said, underwrites reconstruction, but since the volume of sales and prices are not known, how much is misappropriated is not clear.

The insurgency, though diminished, is still a factor. Mr. Malashenko said that as many as several hundred fighters remain, although they do not appear as well organized or equipped as before.

Sarah Mendelson, a director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said it was too soon to say that Chechnya had recovered. Its lingering problems, including the questionable loyalties of the former rebels now in power and the competition between the Kremlin and the Chechen government for oil, are significant enough that the republic could slip into disorder again. History may show, Ms. Mendelson said, that Mr. Kadyrov was only a builder.

“Fundamentally, I don’t know how we can talk about long-term stability with this kind of ‘rule of man,’” she said. “We don’t have a picture of Ramzan as a representative of rule of law of stability. He is about construction.”

Mr. Malashenko, at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said he saw the Chechen president differently, saying that Mr. Kadyrov had become an essential national figure. But he added that he worried that Mr. Kadyrov’s standing was connected to his personal relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

If Mr. Putin leaves office next year at the end of his second term, as required by Russia’s Constitution, he said, Mr. Kadyrov’s fortunes, and his life, could be at risk. “He is hated in Moscow by a lot of people,” he said. “Only Ramzan is able to be a national leader. If he disappears, there will be a quarrel between the clans.”

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